Twenty-four pitch pine cones

February 28.


P. M. — To White Pond. 

I see twenty-four cones brought together under one pitch pine in a field, evidently gnawed off by a squirrel, but not opened. 

Rice says he saw a whistler (?) duck to-day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 28, 1858

I see twenty-four cones brought together under one pitch pine. See February 28, 1860 ("I take up a handsomely spread (or blossomed) pitch pine cone, but I find that a squirrel has begun to strip it first, having gnawed off a few of the scales at the base. The squirrel always begins to gnaw a cone thus at the base."); see also January 22, 1856 ("I count the cores of thirty-four cones on the snow there, and that is not all. Under another pine there are more than twenty, and a well-worn track from this to a fence post three rods distant, under which are the cores of eight cones and a corresponding amount of scales. . . . They have gnawed off the cones which were perfectly closed. ")

Rice says he saw a whistler. See March 23, 1859 ("As we sail upward toward the pond, we scare up two or three golden-eyes, or whistlers, showing their large black heads and black backs, and afterward I watch one swimming not far before us and see the white spot, amid the black, on the side of his head.")  March 27, 1858 ("Among them [sheldrakes], or near by, I at length detect three or four whistlers, by their wanting the red bill, being considerably smaller and less white, having a white spot on the head, a black back, and altogether less white, and also keeping more or less apart and not diving when the rest do.") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,,the Goldeneye (Whistler)